Friday, February 22, 2008

The history of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, stretches back to 5622 – or, uh, 1862 – when Joseph Newmark first obtained a state charter for the Orthodox Congregation B’nai B’rith.

In 1873, eleven years after its founding, B’nai B’rith built its first synagogue on the east side of Broadway (then Fort) between Second and Third. In 1896, the congregation moved into its new home at 9th and Hope.

Cornerstone-laying ceremonies for the congregation’s third and current home occurred March 10, 1929, seven years after ground-breaking. This new Byzantine Revival synagogue was designed primarily by Abraham M. Edelman (who built the 9th and Hope synagogue and whose dad, Abraham Wolf Edelman, was the congregation’s – and Los Angeles’s – first Rabbi) and S. Tilden Norton with David C. Allison of Allison & Allison advising. With its new home, B’nai B’rith changed its name to Wilshire Boulevard Temple.

Now, the Temple was locked up tight the day I was there, so I didn’t get to see, along with the enormous dome (135-foot tall, 100-foot wide, and inlaid with mosaic), those giant murals by Hugo Ballin. Surving Warner Bros Jack, Harry, and Abe Warner financed Ballin to create the Temple’s “precedent-shattering” murals in memory of non-surviving Warner Bros Sam and Milton (the latter not a WB partner). “Precedent–shattering” because having paintings in a house of worship went against Jewish tradition. By this time, of course, the congregation had been Reform for a while.

Ballin’s work consists of 320-foot long, seven-foot tall murals depicting key moments in Jewish history. See some pictures of them here.

Also to see: the Kimball organ with 4,100 pipes, costing a cool $40,000 back in 1929. You have to wonder how different things would’ve been had it been just a few months later, after October 24th.

The $2.5 million-dollar Temple opened to a three-day dedication celebration beginning on June 7, 1929, overseen by Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin, the congregation’s spiritual leader since 1919. Magnin went on to lead Wilshire Boulevard Temple forever, dying in 1984, four years after the Temple’s block was officially named Edgar F. Magnin Square.